It's simply shocking

In a laborartory at Yale University in 1961, Professor Stanley Milgram carried out a dramatic and disturbing psychology experiment. He recruited people from all walks of life, supposedly for an investigation into 'memory and learning', but, unbeknownst to the volunteers, carried out what has since entered contemporary folklore as the Milgram Obedience to Authority Experiment.

Each volunteer was placed in the role of a 'teacher', then paired off with a 'pupil' (who was actually one of Milgram's collaborators). The teacher was instructed to administer a series of increasingly severe electric shocks to the pupil each time the latter incorrectly memorised certain sets of words. The teacher could not see the pupil, but could hear the responses, which were frequently incorrect, as well as the screams that accompanied the simulated electric shocks. Two-thirds of the volunteers were fully obedient, continually administering the maximum 450 volt shocks, even after the pupils' screams were replaced by an ominous silence.

The results did not vary across class or gender lines. They tell us, in stark and disturbing terms, what we already knew: human beings are capable, even under less than extreme conditions, of doing bad things particularly when placed in a context where they are carrying out orders.

Next week, in Glasgow, The Milgram Obedience Experiment will be carried out again, but this time in the name of art. The event has been engineered by Rod Dickinson, a conceptual artist who has already gained some notoriety though his re-enactment, using actors and collaborators, of sermons originally given by Jim Jones, the notorious leader of the People's Temple religious cult. Dickinson is currently looking for a park in which to re-enact the Jonestown massacre, the mass suicide of cult members that took place in their communal retreat in Guyana in 1978.

In his cluttered south London studio, where an assistant is at work recreating, to the last detail, the table on which Milgram's shock machine will sit, I ask Dickinson if he has a morbid fascination with the dark side of the human psyche.

'Not at all, just a genuine curiosity,' he says, smiling, his baby face and soft south London tones belying a nature that, given the painstaking research and preparation that underpins his work, tends towards the obsessive. 'What unites all my projects is a fascination with belief systems and the social systems that make those belief systems work. What Milgram was investigating, and what Jim Jones showed, is that people will suspend belief and reason, and act extremely in a controlled authoritarian environment. At the root of all this, of course, is a philosophical question about what constitutes a human being. Milgram's conclusion goes against all the enlightenment ideas of innate goodness, and seems to suggest that the individual is constructed through institutions and social structures.'

Just as Dickinson claims his underlying interest is anthropological, he insists that, in the detailed restaging of these events, he creates an art moment with an aesthetic logic of its own. Too literal to be theatre, and too darkly strange to fit into the historical battles' re-enactment genre that inspires grown men in their droves to dress up and play Roundheads and Cavaliers, his work comes closest to the dread realm of performance art.

After training as a painter, Dickinson went conceptual in the early Nineties, when, alongside a loose collective of other art-pranksters, he began creating crop circles under cover of darkness in the fields of rural England.

The resulting conspiracy culture and wealth of outlandish theories that blossomed around the crop circles - and continued to bloom even after the artists came clean about their mass deception - convinced Dickinson that 'age-old belief systems based on superstition, folklore and magic remain potent, but they now have very hi-tech, futuristic mythologies projected on to them'. Hence the collective global wish to believe in often incredibly detailed accounts of alien abductions, which often feature the kind of intrusive medical experiments much mocked by anal probe-fixated makers of South Park.

Dickinson has previously exhibited a huge range of material found on crop circles - downloads from websites, pamphlets, photographs, oral testimonies - in galleries that, in the process, came to resemble information sites. The line between information and art is further complicated by the fact that most of the stuff on display has not been created by Dickinson, but simply collated by him and re-represented. 'I prepare everything,' he elaborates, 'but at the moment the event begins, I'm not really present at all. You visit a gallery expecting to see an artist's work, but in this instance, the text isn't mine, the photographs aren't mine. I'm more an invisible ordering presence.'

In the case of the Milgram Reenactment, the event will involve the creation of several layers of artifice - actors portraying actors portraying volunteers - on top of an event that, in its original form, was already loaded with artifice. 'In one way,' he admits, 'my work is all about the impossibility of recreating an event of this nature. It's an impossible conceit, but often something else happens in the performance. When we restaged Jim Jones's sermons at the ICA, for instance, some of the audience got completely caught up in the fervour; they were clapping and cheering Jones's anti-American, anti-establishment rhetoric. Despite entering an art environment, to witness an art event, they seemed willing to suspend disbelief in some way too. That's really what I'm after, that moment when something magical - or disturbing - occurs despite, or because of, the utterly artificial nature of the re-enactment. It's a strangely exhilarating experience.' And one, you feel, that Jim Jones and Stanley Milgram, in their separate ways, would not be the least bit surprised by.

The Milgram Re-enactment is at 3pm at CCA Gallery, Glasgow on Friday and at 5pm next Sunday. For details of the supporting programme from 27 Feb to 28 Mar call 0141 352 4900